Cloud computing is rapidly changing the Internet into a collection of clouds, which provide a variety of computing resources, storage resources, and, in the future, a variety of resources that are currently unimagined.
Yet, frequently it is difficult to effectively provide a given service from a single environment. This is so because a product or service offering often requires the cooperation of multiple services in providing functionality sufficient to be considered holistic.
Historically, service offerings deployed in an enterprise data center could be sufficiently controlled to ensure that trust relationships between the cooperating services were maintained. However, as seen in recent years, many service offering deployments grow to include multiple heterogeneous environments, which span multiple network segments, data center locations and/or include both data center (inside the firewall) and cloud (un-protected by firewall) environments. Such data center/cloud deployment environments are unsuitable for many service offerings; hampering the desired flexibility of the Information Technology (IT) department in providing low cost services to the enterprise.
That is, it is cost ineffective and impractical to think a given service can in all cases be wholly contained with all the supporting services it needs within a single cloud environment and yet the trend in the industry is to outsource services and data to cloud environments.